


Blood and Unfinished Leather

by punkrockgaia



Series: Bad Romance [3]
Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Alcohol, Blood, Gore, M/M, Physical Torture, Slut Shaming, Smoking, Strex, Violence, emotional torture, noncon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-28
Updated: 2013-12-28
Packaged: 2018-01-06 12:13:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,834
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1106674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/punkrockgaia/pseuds/punkrockgaia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cecil is made of blood and unfinished leather.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Party Games

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, thank you to VidenteFernandez for Diego!

Kevin stared through the picture window, fascinated. The man in the booth was so much like him, and yet so different. For one thing, Kevin felt as happy as a clam, always did. His counterpart, on the other hand, was gripping the side of his desk with white knuckles and was grinding his teeth audibly as he read the StrexCorp sponsorship message of the hour. It was too bad, really. 

He turned to his boss/boyfriend, resplendent in his bespoke wool suit, perfect hair perfectly slicked back from his perfect obsidian eyes. "We should do something nice for Cecil, Diego. He doesn't seem very happy."

Perfect Diego chuckled deep in his chest and ruffled Kevin's hair. "That's my baby, always thinking about others. Don't worry, though. Mr. Palmer won't be neglected. I have... plans for him after the broadcast."

Kevin pouted as well as the gashed smile at the corners of his mouth would allow. "Aww, do we really have to wait that long?"

"Ah, _mi corazon_ , you know I hate to make you wait, but it would be better if we did. We don't want any of the... butt-inskys that live in this town to come and interrupt the party while we're cheering our new friend up, do we? Especially not that Carlos."

Kevin made a face. "Ugh, _Carlos_. It's not fair that he gets to look like you, not when he's so... so... not you!" The mild hint of annoyance in his usually sunny voice betrayed the depths of his antipathy.

"I know, my dearest one, I know. But remember what we talked about? We can't expect our doppelgängers to understand if they haven't been taught. It's up to us to teach them the good news about Strex, to teach them to believe in a Smiling God. Isn't that right?"

Kevin's expression resumed its familiar beam. "Oh, Diego, you're so smart! I would have been impatient and ruined everything."

Diego kissed him on the forehead, just above the scar line of his sealed third eye. "Your enthusiasm is one of the many things I love about you, _mi alma_. Now, why don't you bring me the party favors? Only about fifteen minutes left..."

Kevin gave a little squeal of anticipation, then scurried over to where the big, black leather satchel waited like a sleeping gila monster. He petted it lovingly. Diego had such wonderful toys, and he was so good at using them. Licking his lips, he opened the satchel and gazed lovingly at all the shiny implements inside, then closed it back up, hefted it, and lugged it back to the hallway outside the broadcast booth.

He bounced up and down on the balls of his feet, unable to contain his excitement. From the moment he'd met Cecil, he wanted to get to know him better. He gave such great hugs! And Diego didn't even mind Kevin sharing himself with Cecil. He was a good sharer.

He pressed his face to the window and watched as Cecil leaned close to the microphone and intoned "Good night, Night Vale, good night..." He turned to his lover, grinning.

"Is it time _now_ , Diego?"

Diego nodded. "Yes, Kevin, it's time. Do you remember what we talked about?"

"Yes, Diego!"

"Wonderful, my beautiful brilliant genius darling." He kissed Kevin deeply, then pulled back and patted him on the rear. "Go get 'im, Tiger." He watched the view appreciatively as Kevin wriggled over to the coffee pot and poured some into a chipped, stained mug emblazoned with the legend "Radio Hosts Do It On The Air".


	2. Play Date

Cecil looked up and grimaced as Kevin entered the booth. He no longer felt the same sense of terror when he saw him, but the revulsion was still there. At least he didn't feel the urge to strangle him. Not much. 

Kevin smiled that horrible not-a-smile and brandished a coffee mug at him. "Cecil, you did such a nice job with your show today! I brought you a drink in your favorite cup!"

Cecil sighed and rubbed his eyes, pushing his glasses up to his forehead. "Kevin, I wouldn't drink anything you handed to me if I was dying of thirst. No offense."

"Aww, look, it's fine." Kevin took a swig out of the cup and held it out to him.

"Ew, and now you spit in it. You're really not sweetening the deal --" He was cut off as an arm came from behind him and clamped a cloth over his mouth and nose. He smelled something sickly-sweet, and his struggles weakened as the room went black.

He had a strange dream, of flying and falling and the void. He dimly felt himself retch as the dizzy spiral turned his guts inside out, vaguely heard a muffled curse, felt a sharp pain in his neck, then back to the suffocating velvet darkness. 

Slowly he came back to himself, head aching like a rotten tooth. His tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth, he was cold, the muscles in his hips and shoulders were stressed, torn and screaming. He couldn't move his legs or arms. He opened his eyes only to find the world a sickening blur, so he shifted focus to his third eye. 

There wasn't much to see. He was in a small, searingly-white room, a room with no furniture and only a thin, grey nylon carpet on the floor. He was on that carpet, wrists and ankles shackled together, forcing him into a fetal position. 

He was naked.

Oh. Oh, this was not good. He expanded his focus outward, but for some reason he could only see just outside the room, into the space between the wall joists. Frustrated and beginning to panic, he pushed as hard as he could but could only dimly glimpse an all-white corridor before he had to fall back into himself, exhausted and panting. He passed out again.

The next time he woke, it was to a warm, wet pressure on his ear. A tongue. For a moment, his mind allowed him a gentle bit of confusion. He arched his back and purred.

"Ohhh, Carlos..."

A giggle; the world's happiest maniac. "No, silly, it's Kevin! Don't you remember? We brought you here to play!"

Electrified, he swung his head back toward the giddy voice. He couldn't get much momentum, trussed as he was, but he still heard a satisfying crunch as his occiput made contact with rather more delicate nasal cartilage. Kevin cried out and he felt a brief, warm patter of fluid along the side of his face, then his breath came out in a wheezing gasp as a pointy-toed shoe drove itself into his diaphragm.

Sharp fingers clawed at his scalp, tangling in his hair and wrenching his head back on his neck. Hot breath that smelled like meat and blood gusted across his face. 

"Palmer. My baby wants to play, so I suggest you play nice. It'll go much better for you."

"Never, you fucking psychopath."

"Ooh, harsh words. Funny you didn't say that when it was just you and I, eh?" A fingernail traced the shell of his ear, cutting inwards to nick with a razor edge. "But I think you'll come around. Kevin is... persuasive. And if not? Mmmmm. Well, there are people you care about, remember that. This doesn't have to be you. If we were able to capture you, just remember that outsiders are usually even less prepared than you Night Vale scum. And far less resilient." He patted Cecil's cheek and drew back. "And if you even _fantasize_ about injuring my Kevin's pretty face again, I'll send him away and _I'll_ be your playmate for the day. I'd love to show you your own liver, stuck on the end of my cock." He started to stand, then hesitated. "Oh, and no peeking." He grasped the sides of Cecil's head and slowly, deliberately drove his thumbs into his third eye as the bound man yowled, indistinguishable from a wildcat in heat. He pressed firmly for a moment, then dropped him back, roughly, to the floor.

Cecil writhed as the world became electrical shocks and televised static. His lower, opacivoyant eyes bulged as he vainly tried to bring the world into sharp edges, but without his glasses or contacts and without the supplement of his clairvoyant eye, everything was fuzz and watery color.

_Oh gods oh gods oh gods let it not be broken forever gods gods gods please I want to see please..._

His internal pleading halted as he felt sharpened teeth on the side of his neck and the sweaty heat of a body precisely the size and shape of his own press against his back. Familiar arms sheathed in ropy muscle encircled him, the temperature and texture of the skin undistinguishable from his. A stiff cock, the exact dimensions of which he could have mapped from memory down to the veins and the slightest scar from circumcision, a cock which he'd discovered in the darkness of his solitary bedroom before he'd known any others, prodded against his ass. The body behind him smelled like nothing. The body behind him smelled like him.

A breeze of sunshine and glitter gusted over his ears, borne on a backbone of jagged hematite spines. "Oh, Cecil, I love you so much. I know you didn't mean to hurt me. I forgive you. We're gonna have such fun!" Kevin flipped him over and kissed him, long viper tongue sliding down his throat.

At that point Cecil's conscious mind mercifully stuttered out. Everything after that was sensation.

Terror.

Breathless, hysterical laughter.

Wet, copper drip of blood.

The sound of metal on metal, spitting sparks against the migraine backdrop of screeching white.

The bright static and the queasy, spinning shapes.

Pain, so much pain. 

And, when his body responded to friction and probing fingers and a wet mouth, agonizing, hateful, despicable pleasure.

Then crushing, soul-obliterating shame.

Then nothing.


	3. Try Not to Remember

The next time Cecil woke, he could feel he was sitting upright, in a chair. He could feel the soft weight of his clothing as it hung on his shoulders and across his lap, the pressure of plastic eyeglass frames on his ears and nose. He opened his eyes, tentatively. The world was in focus, somewhat. The third eye was still nothing but static.

He tentatively checked in with his physical systems. Everything pretty much hurt or burned or ached, and there were sticky wet patches on his clothing that most likely correlated to blood, but nothing seemed to be broken or in any way seriously damaged. Well, except his eye. He felt the panic again start to rise at the prospect of losing it forever, but pushed it down as forcefully as he could. Not now.

He was pushing a lot of stuff down, truth be told. Even for someone as adept at denial as himself, this was a big job. The trick was to focus on externalities, to not so much as poke or jostle the whisper-thin membrane that was keeping the monsters trapped in a safe part of his psyche.

Externalities. 

He was in a conference room. Maybe it was the same room he'd been in all along, now with the furniture returned. He was sitting in a pleather chair, the kind with wheels and a seat that you could move up and down using a lever. Neither the wheels nor the lever were doing him much good, as he was still shackled, but the wheels and the lever were there nonetheless. The room smelled like carpet cleaner and stale coffee. A large yellow StrexCorp logo dominated the center of the conference table.

Externalities. 

Even with his glasses, he couldn't see much detail more than a couple of feet away (not without the boost from his clairvoyant eye), but he could see that the tabletop and a whiteboard on the wall next to him were pristine, unmarred. Not like the conference room at the station, which still bore the marks from when Tiffany McElroy, the host of the "Old Fashioned Ladies' Homemaker Hour" had written expletives and drawn crude genitalia all over the board in permanent marker. 

His thoughts skated away to safety. The subject of genitalia, frequently one of his favorite topics of thought, was not a safe one at the moment.

Externalities.

He looked down at his hands and wiggled his fingers. They were still all there and all functioning. The cuticles were ragged, but that was nothing new. He'd picked up a bad nail-biting habit when he'd quit smoking a few years back. Carlos said it was okay, though, that no one ever died from chewing his fingernails.

His fingernails... His fingernails had lots of blood caked under them... Blood and other stuff, other bodily fluids... No.

Externalities. 

_Externalities, Cecil._

An anxiety much deeper than anxiety started to build. The membrane quivered. The monsters were restless. His eyes darted around the room, desperate for a distraction. There was nothing. Nothing. Everything was white and grey and sterile and oh gods no no no

_Snick._ The door to the conference room opened on silent hydraulic hinges and Cecil's brain snapped back into place. A man dressed in an expensive suit, slicked back hair, jet-black eyes, the man who had stolen Carlos' face entered the room carrying a briefcase. He walked around to the other side of the room and sat across the table from Cecil, giving him a blessedly-wide berth as he did.

"Palmer. Nice to see you're awake. You're really not much fun when you're unconscious."

Cecil felt a growl escape his throat, a throat grown raw from screaming.

"Oh, now, is that any way to treat one of your hosts, when we've shown you such hospitality?"

"Just fucking kill me now and get it over with."

"Again? In the name of the smiling god, Palmer. Every time I see you, you beg me to kill you. Of course, I can't blame you. If I were you, I'd want to be dead, too. Regrettably, the answer is still no. I'm not going to end your little pestilent life, not yet. You haven't suffered nearly enough."

"Big mistake. I'm going to personally destroy you."

Diego chuckled, a sound like the crunch of teeth on glass shards. "You know, you really are cute in a hideous, delusional kind of way. I'm beginning to see why Kevin likes you so much. And he _does_ like you. He enjoyed his time with you so much that this might have to become a regular thing. Until he gets bored. Then you're mine."

"Just try to make me."

"No, you don't understand. That's the beauty of the Synernist mindset. We won't ever have to 'make' you again. You'll come along willingly. Truthfully, you would have come along willingly today, but we thought it might be more fun to surprise you."

"Now who's delusional?"

Diego raised a perfectly-groomed eyebrow, then opened up the briefcase. He pulled out some pictures and spread them on the table, pushing them close to Cecil. 

Cecil squinted at them, then blushed. They were photos of himself and Diego, in the booth at the radio station, doing... well, what they'd done.

"How -- ? I thought --"

"You thought they were destroyed, right? They were, but not before copies were handed over for the Strex archives for safekeeping. We have a lot of useful information, ever since we made the SSP one of our subsidiaries. Useful information, going back years. Decades." He looked down at the photos, then back up. "For instance, I know that this is the way it's always been." He tapped the corner of one of the pictures. "Hasn't it, Cecil? You've spent so long looking for someone who can save you from yourself, but it's never enough. No one can ever love you enough to plug up that purulent, maggot-infested chest wound you call a heart. Carlos couldn't. So you found me."

Cecil started to squirm a bit in his chair. "No, uh, I --"

Diego extracted a folder from the briefcase and began paging through it. "It's what happened with Harlan, right? You tried to stay faithful to him, but you just got so _lonely_." He flipped the page. "And, oh, that's an impressive bit of whoring. So many. Married men, Cecil? Shameful. But at two a.m., who cares? Find someone, anyone, who you can rub up against in the hopes that maybe this would be the one. But they never were. I know. I know they always left when they found out who you really were, what your slimy insides looked like."

"No..." He couldn't get enough breath to do more than whisper.

"Yes. They do. They all leave. They all leave, like Carlos is going to leave, when I send him these photos. Maybe I'll even tell him how much fun you had with Kevin. Sure, it wasn't exactly your idea, but he really knows how to press your buttons, doesn't he?"

"Please..."

"Carlos will leave, and you'll be all alone again, just you and your thoughts, just like the first time. They all leave, Cecil. All alone. Even your mother. She knew what you were. She left you all alone. All. Alone. They. All. Leave."

Cecil was curled into himself as much as his chains would allow. He wanted to say something witty and biting, but the monsters were coming out. Not the monsters from that afternoon, but old monsters, monsters he'd forgotten. All he could do was shudder and repeat one word, over and over.

"Please please please please..."

"Ah, look at the state you've gotten yourself into. Truly pathetic. It's really kind of amazing you haven't ended it all. But you're a tenacious little cockroach, aren't you? You cling to your ugly little life. And I want you to keep doing that. Like I said, you amuse my Kevin. So, I'll make you a deal. You make like a good boy and come along nicely when Kevin wants a play date, and maybe I'll hold on to these photos, for now. For the time being, Carlos can stay in the dark as to what a rancid, broken slut you are. How does that sound?"

Cecil whimpered. 

"What was that, Palmer? I don't think I heard you."

"Y-yes..."

"That's 'Yes, Sir,' Palmer."

"Yes, Sir," he gasped.

"Much better. Now, let's get you home, shall we? I don't want your Night Vale stink contaminating the building any longer." He pressed a button on the telephone, murmured a few words, and two yellow-jumpsuited maintenance workers appeared in the room. Diego unlocked Cecil's chains and the men picked him up and toted him to a waiting limousine as if he were a piece of luggage. They didn't chain him back up. They didn't need to.


	4. Drink to Forget

Cecil staggered up the stairs to his apartment and fumbled for his keys, a small paper bag clutched in his right hand. The sight was starting to return, slowly, to his clairvoyant eye, but it ached horribly to use it and the vision was still pretty blurry. He heard the door to the apartment across the hall shift as Mrs. Greenstead peered through the peephole at him, but he ignored it. He really wasn't up to answer many questions at the moment.

He opened the door and limped inside. As he did, his phone began to buzz crazily with missed calls. He blinked at it. Apparently he didn't get coverage in Desert Bluffs, because it seemed as though Carlos had been trying to get ahold of him for several hours. He lacked the energy to listen to the messages. 

He'd just started to loosen his tie when the phone rang with Carlos' special ringtone. He thought about not answering it, but he couldn't bring himself to just ignore the man who he thought of as the love of his life. He hit answer.

"Hello?"

"Christ, Cecil, where have you been? I've been trying to get ahold of you since the end of your show!"

Cecil sighed. "Sorry. Sorry. I got... caught up in something at the station."

"Are you okay? You sound terrible."

"Yeah, I'm fine. I'm just really tired."

"Aw, my poor baby. You want me to come over and make it all better?" There was a purr of warm innuendo in the scientist's voice.

_Gods, I'd love that, Carlos, but I'm all dead inside,_ Cecil thought. "No, that's, uh, okay. I think I just, um, need to get some sleep tonight."

"Oh." 

"Sorry," Cecil murmured. He felt a twinge in his side and a thought occurred to him. "The thing is, uh, I'll probably be really busy for a few days. Er, a week, let's say. I'll, uh, call you when I have more time to see you." The bruises should be faded in a week.

There was a pause on the other end of the line. "Cecil, are you trying to break things off with me?"

"No! Gods, no, sorry, Carlos, my beautiful Carlos. Oh, gods no, no, no. I just... Ugh. I only want to give you my full attention, you know? I'm going to be distracted."

"Well, that's okay. I don't mind -- I'm usually distracted, you know that. I want to see you. I miss you."

"Give me a few days, okay? Please. I'm okay, I promise. Let me have a few days, then I'm all yours."

"Well, all right. But I'll be using those days to think up a LONG list of things I'd like to do to you..."

Cecil suppressed a shudder. "That sounds great," he whispered through a mouth suddenly gone dry. _This is Carlos. Carlos._ He forced a smile into his voice as tears prickled at the corners of his eyes. "I'm looking forward to it."

"Me too. Okay, get some sleep before you drop over."

"I will. And Carlos?"

"Yeah?"

"I love you."

"Love you too, Ceese. Sweet dreams." There was a soft click as Carlos hung up his end of the line.

Cecil stood in his living room for a moment longer, staring at the phone, then turned it off and set it down on his end table. He opened the bag and extracted a plastic pill bottle. **StrexCorp brand Smilex! (tm). Turn that frown upside down!** , read the label. He shook his head.

"No thanks, I prefer to do things the old-fashioned way," he announced to the empty apartment. 

He shuffled into his kitchen and grabbed a bottle of bourbon out of the cabinet and his emergency cigarettes from the freezer. They'd be awfully stale at this point, but he wasn't about to care. He grabbed an ashtray and a pack of matches from where he'd stashed them in his living room and made his way into his bedroom, grabbing every blanket, throw, towel, and afghan in the place on the way there. He set the smoking implements down on the nightstand then arranged the blankets into a shallow pile on his futon. 

He stripped naked and climbed inside with the bottle, then began to drink to forget.


End file.
